Daylight savings

I took this picture of a wall lamp in a hotel room in Iceland last September. There were two of them, otherwise the room was dark. When I kept one lit and turned the other off, I thought the one was quite beautiful. The image reminded me of the art of the late Dan Flavin, whose work was always clean as a whistle.

When I turned on C-SPAN last night to watch the great Road to the White House coverage, Mitt Romney was right there, speaking to a large crowd of believers in Colorado. I say "believers" because there was the slight whiff of a sermon, in the modest Republican mode of call-and-response, emanating from Mr. Romney. I watched, transfixed, as he delivered the current anti-Obama screed. I have to admit my fascination, and I was all ears until I heard Mitt say (and I got  the quote exactly, writing it down in my reporters' notepad) "When I'm President, I'm going to be the voice of the parents and the children because they don't have a union." When the applause finally died down I hit the remote.

USC was playing Oregon in LA. The Trojans were getting creamed by the Ducks, the football equivalent of Romney losing all red states to Obama. It seemed somehow righteous that the brothel of college football that is USC was being taken down by the more progressive, populist and therefore enlightened school to the north.

Back to C-SPAN. Obama was getting equal time, being introduced at a rally in Virginia by Bill Clinton. Bill looked almost Italian in a designer leather jacket with hand stitched-white piping. I couldn't get past the sight of Bill not looking very good; he's starting to wear his death, to try it on for size. Bill Clinton is the Elvis Presley of American politics, I get that, though his legacy as a President is vastly overrated. For better or worse he has that rare and wonderful American gift of being able to look and sound sincere when we know he's lying. Bill gave a too-long intro and then brought out Barack. The two men hugged sincerely, Barack whispering in Bill's ear just before they broke their embrace. I wondered what was was said? Perhaps nothing was said. Perhaps it was scripted by the President's handlers to connote a certain continuation of legacy...or perhaps I'm being too cynical.

I watched Barack, as he's very watchable. Things are looking good for him again. Most of the people I know who keep track of things like this think he's going to win. He certainly has the Establishment behind him--The New York Times, for instance, which Romney may offset by getting all that dough from the Koch boys and Karl Rove's cash-puking machine--and he is the incumbent, a truth with underestimated strength. Then again, Barack's raising & spending as much if not more than the adversarial party. The only thing that's clear to me when thinking about the two men is that only one should be President: Mitt Romney's a canned good, and in contradistinction to him I'm now thinking of Barack Obama as our Savior-in-Chief.

The images from the east coast were so startling  I've cut out a black & white pic from The NY Times of a man carrying a painting from one of the galleries in Chelsea that were drenched by the hurricane. You can see the water still dripping from the canvas and what looks like slime around the edges. I put it near the desk where I work and write to remind me of the perishability of art, that it's just stuff really, made by human beings who hope it has a higher purpose for other human beings who hope the same.

I have a friend in NYC who had to live in a pizza parlor for almost 2 days. For some weird reason it was the only place in his neighborhood that had electricity. He's 80 years old and his wife's in her early 60's. He said everyone was really great, and very civil, though it was spooky to walk out into the street at night and see no electric light.